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Motivation Cognition Hypothesis Question: What is the relationship between task complexity and output complexity?  Is there a relationship between task complexity and output complexity?  If so, what is the nature of the relationship?

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Participants Experimental group: 10 native Japanese speakers from advanced ESL classes in New York City AAverage age – 38 GGender- 9 females and 1 male Comparison Group 1: 5 native speakers of American English AAverage age: 33 AAll females Comparison Group 2: 10 native speakers of American English

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Procedure Task: Story narration under 4 different conditions 4 stories vis-à-vis 4 conditions Instructions II am going to show you a set of pictures that tell a story. Please take as long as you like to look over the pictures, then tell me the story as if I cannot see the pictures. We will do this twice. The first set will be practice, just to make sure you understand the instructions. There is only one “correct” story for these pictures.

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Limitations and Next Steps Further data analysis  Fluency as well as accuracy  Lexical complexity  Syntactic complexity in terms of S-nodes per T-unit

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Conclusion The jury is still out. Task complexity is a complex notion requiring finer- grained analysis than has generally been given. More conceptual work is needed. IIn examining the relationship between task complexity and output complexity, there is a need to differentiate between content complexity and form complexity, and more importantly, to investigate how attention is allocated to form and content during task performance. TThere is a need to track down the differential impact of task- intrinsic complexity and contrived complexity MMore attention should be given to task-intrinsic complexity